Remember all the excitement about Penryn a couple years ago, which took the Core 2 and made it more efficient with a new manufacturing process? It's the same deal here, as the tick of Intel's tick-tock cycle. "Tock" is a whole new microarchitecture, while "tick" is a die shrink of that, which makes it more power efficient. Nehalem is the tock—it was 45 nanometers—and Westmere is the tick, shrunk to 32nm.

Arrandale is what this set of mobile Core i5 chips, based on Westmere, is called. (Here's our primer on Intel codenames.) One thing in particular about Arrandale is that it has a graphics core built right onto the main chip package, which Intel says is good to go for Blu-ray.

Anyways, what all this means is that there's about to be a whole bunch of new laptops with faster, better Intel chips inside that won't munch your battery as hard. [Cnet]

And you have to figure that's pretty far behind, since the Larrabee launch timeframe was 2009/2010. The only way you'll be able to touch Larrabee now is as a development platform for graphics engines or high-performance computing, in order to develop for future Intel products.

Intel says they're going to announce new plans for discrete cards some time in 2010—mayyybe CES, where we talked to former Intel Chairman Craig Barrett about Larrabee last year? But, more likely at the Intel Developer Forum later in the year. [Intel]

The architecture really is a huge leap forward, according to people who've gone through it in-depth. Interestingly, the huge focus for Fermi is GPU computing. The first actual goods coming out using Fermi should be the GT300 series cards, which, besides the 512 cores sorted into 16 streaming processors with 32 cores each, uses a brand new GDDR5 memory setup.

PC Perspective has an epic write-up breaking down Fermi in detail that's worth a whirl, and of course Nvidia's got lots of fluff themselves all about Fermi. Strangely, they don't explain the name, which sounds like a sad little poodle. [Nvidia, PC Perspective, Anandtech]

They Call It "Open" For a Reason
One of the more excellent aspects of Snow Leopard, actually, is its full-scale deployment of OpenCL 1.0—Open Computing Language—a framework that allows programmers to more easily utilize the full power of mixes of different kinds of processors like GPUs and multi-core CPUs. (Much of the excitement for that is in leveraging the GPU for non-graphical applications.)

OpenCL lives up to its name: It is a royalty-free open standard managed by the Khronos Group, and supported by AMD/ATI, Apple, ARM, IBM, Intel, Nvidia, among others. Interesting thing about this open industry standard is that it was developed and proposed by... Apple.

What Is a Standard?
By "standard," we're talking about a format, interface or programming framework that a bunch of companies or people or organizations agree is the way something's going to get done, whether it's how a movie is encoded or the way websites are programmed. Otherwise, nothing works. A video that plays on one computer won't play on another, web sites that work in one browser don't work in another, etc. With increased connectedness between different machines and different platforms, standards are increasingly vital to progress.

Standards can range from open (anybody can use them, for free) to open with conditions (anybody can use them as long they follow conditions X, Y and Z) to closed (you gotta have permission, and most likely, pay for it). Some companies view standards strictly as royalty machines; others don't make much money on them, instead using them to make sure developers do things the way they want them to. Apple falls into this latter category, by choice or possibly just by fate.

Kicking the Big Guy in the Shins
Of course, OpenCL isn't the only open standard that Apple's had a hand in creating or supporting that actually went industry-wide. When you're the little guy—as Apple was, and still is in computer OS marketshare, with under 10 percent—having a hand in larger industry standards is important. It keeps your platform and programming goals from getting steamrolled by, say, the de facto "standards" enforced by the bigger guy who grips 90 percent of the market.

If you succeed in creating a standard, you're making everybody else do things the way you want them done. If you're doubting how important standards are, look no further than the old Sony throwing a new one at the wall every week hoping it'll stick. Or Microsoft getting basically everybody but iTunes to use its PlaysForSure DRM a couple years ago. Or its alternative codecs and formats for basically every genuine industry standard out there. To be sure, there is money to be made in standards, but only if the standard is adopted—and royalties can be collected.

Web Standards: The Big Headache
The web has always been a sore spot in the standards debate. The web is a "universal OS," or whatever the cloud-crazy pundits call it, but what shapes your experience is your browser and in part, how compliant it is with the tools web developers use to build their products. Internet Exploder shit all over standards for years, and web programmers still want IE6 to die in a fiery eternal abyss.

Enter WebKit, an open source browser engine developed by Apple based off of the KHTML engine. It's so standards-compliant it tied with Opera's Presto engine to be the first to pass the Acid3 test. What's most striking about WebKit isn't the fact it powers Safari and Google Chrome on the desktop, but basically every full-fledged smartphone browser: iPhone, Android, Palm Pre, Symbian and (probably) BlackBerry. So WebKit hasn't just driven web standards through its strict adherence to them, but it has essentially defined, for now, the way the "real internet" is viewed on mobile devices. All of the crazy cool web programming you see now made is made possible by standards-compliant browsers.

True, OpenCL and WebKit are open source—Apple's been clever about the way it uses open source, look no further than the guts of OS X—but Apple is hardly devoted to the whole "free and open" thing, even when it comes to web standards.

All the AV Codecs You Can Eat
The recent debate over video in the next web standards, known collectively as HTML5, shows that: Mozilla supports the open-source Ogg Theora video codec, but Apple says it's too crappy to become the web's default video standard—freeing everyone from the tyranny of Adobe's Flash. Apple says Ogg's quality and hardware acceleration support don't match up to the Apple-supported MPEG-4 standardized H.264 codec, which is tied up by license issues that keep it from being freely distributed and open. (Google is playing it up the middle for the moment: While it has doubts about the performance of Ogg Theora, Chrome has built-in support for it and H.264.)

Apple has actually always been a booster of MPEG's H.264 codec, which is the default video format supported by the iPhone—part of the reason YouTube re-encoded all of its videos, actually—and gets hardware acceleration in QuickTime X with Snow Leopard. H.264 is basically becoming the video codec (it's in Blu-ray, people use it for streaming, etc.).

Why would Apple care? It means Microsoft's WMV didn't become the leading standard.

A sorta similar story with AAC, another MPEG standard. It's actually the successor to MP3, with better compression quality—and no royalties—but Apple had the largest role in making it mainstream by making it their preferred audio format for the iPod and iTunes Store. (It saw some limited use in portables a little earlier, but it didn't become basically mandatory for audio players to support it until after the iPod.) Another bonus, besides AAC's superiority to MP3: Microsoft's WMA, though popular for a while, never took over.

FireWire I Mean iLINK I Mean IEEE 1394
Speaking of the early days of the iPod, we can't leave out FireWire, aka IEEE 1394. Like OpenCL, Apple did a lot of the initial development work (Sony, IBM and others did a lot of work on it as well), presented it to a larger standards body—the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers—and it became the basis for a standard. They tried to charge a royalty for it at first, but that didn't work out. It's a successful standard in a lot of ways—I mean, it is still on a lot of stuff like hard drives and camcorders still—but USB has turned out to be more universal, despite being technically inferior. (At least until USB 3.0 comes out, hooray!)

Update: Oops, forgot Mini DisplayPort, Apple's shrunken take on DisplayPort—a royalty-free video interface standard from VESA that's also notably supported by Dell—which'll be part of the official DisplayPort 1.2 spec. Apple licenses it for no fee, unless you sue Apple for patent infringement, which is a liiiiittle dicey. (On the other hand, we don't see it going too far as industry standard, which is why we forgot about it.)

That's just a relatively quick overview of some of the standards Apple's had a hand in one way or another, but it should give you an idea about how important standards are, and how a company with a relatively small marketshare (at least, in certain markets) can use them wield a lot of influence over a much broader domain.

Shaping standards isn't always for royalty checks or dominance—Apple's position doesn't allow them to be particularly greedy when it comes to determining how you watch stuff or browse the internet broadly. They've actually made things better, at least so far. But, one glance at the iPhone app approval process should give anybody who thinks they're the most gracious tech company second thoughts about that.

Still something you wanna know? Send questions about standards, things that are open other than your mom's legs or Sony Ultra Memory Stick XC Duo Quadro Micro Pro II to tips@gizmodo.com, with "Giz Explains" in the subject line.

ATI's first, with the RV870-based Radeon HD 5800 series shipping out next month (no surprise, since they were showing it off a couple months ago), while Nvidia's following with the GT300 series that'll apparently hit in December, according to DigiTimes' sources. On the other hand, Nvidia seems to have the lead on the actual Windows 7 front, since their GPUs are already Windows Hardware Qualification Lab-certified with support for the new DirectCompute API. Bonus: Your existing Nvidia graphics works with it, if it ain't ancient.

Then again, there's no excuse like a new operating system for buying hundreds of dollars in new computer gear. [DigiTimes]

Engadget says details are scant, but mention that AMD says that new DX11 features, such as the Compute Shader, will help improve Windows 7 performance, among other things. They expect their DirectX 11 products to be available in late 2009. [AMD via Engadget]

I meant to post this a few days ago, but it fits in really nicely with our benchmark testing to explain what's going on under Windows 7's hood. Microsoft obviously focused a lot on the user experience in Windows 7, so a lot of work went into improving desktop responsiveness—smoothing out the little snags or hangs up that made people feel like Vista was too slow. Which is apparently a hard thing to do, since a million different things can cause slowdown. But the most frequent cause of hangups is a bottleneck caused by one graphics device interface application—an app that taps your graphics card—waiting on another GDI app that's being all slow and crappy.

In Vista, this could happen because the way the GDI was designed, a single app could hold a system-wide global lock, so apps running simultaneously constantly jockey for the lock in order to render on the screen, and if one asshole app doesn't let go, it screws every other app waiting in line. So Microsoft re-designed the way this stuff is orchestrated, so multiple apps can "reliably" render at the same time, meaning less bottlenecks. Besides improving reliability, the redesign actually improved performance with multiple GDI apps running simultaneously on multi-core processors, so you'll see real benefits from going multi-core, which no doubt makes Intel's Craig Barrett happy.

Oh yes, they also reduced the memory footprint, but anybody running Windows 7 already noticed this. So yes, Windows 7 really is more responsive, even if run-of-the-mill benchmarks can't exactly measure how that is. [Engineering Windows 7]

Occupying a space only millimeters wide, and supporting the Open GL ES 2.0 standard, Product Manager Remi Pedersen says that the Mali 200, and eventually, Mali 400, are designed to work in a phone that goes 2-3 days between charges. Pedersen says the first phones will appear at the end of 2009, followed by an influx of devices in 2010.

Graphically, games shown were on the level of PS2 and Xbox, able to push a decent number of pixels with a smooth framerate. A port of the original Project Gotham Racing runs on the Mali 200 GPU with virtually no lag and a decent number of polygons.

But they can also provide hardware acceleration for device UIs, process HD video and make Flash usable on mobile devices. ARM says that features such as HD video encode/decode and Flash decoding will be centered more around the multicore Mali 400, which will appear en masse sometime in 2010. And by all accounts, we can probably look forward to seeing this line of Mali GPUs in future netbooks and MIDs.

Here's quick vid of the Mali 200 in action. It's pretty smooth for a mobile GPU.

In a nutshell, ray tracing works by tracing rays (ta da!) or lines of light from a certain point through pixels in an image plane. It's hard to do, because it takes a lot of processing juju, with a fast processor that has a ton of cache memory.

Nvidia and AMD are working on a hybrid approach that uses ray-tracing and rasterization (their current technique). Which makes sense in context of what Intel chief Craig Barrett told me at CES: "Everybody's kind of looking at the same thing, which is, 'How do I mix and match a CPU- and a GPU-type core, or six of these and two of those, and how do you have the software solution to go hand-in-hand?'"

Right now, Caustic says they have a hardware and software setup that can zoomify ray-tracing 20x over today's hardware, and that by 2010, they'll have goods that'll do it 200x faster. Sadly, they're not moving into the gaming space first, instead focusing on architects and animators, meaning we'll have to wait for like Crysis 4 to see if Caustic can... well, you know the rest. [NYT]

So a quick recap on the original issue and the back and forth between Nvidia and the Inquirer: Nvidia admitted back in July "significant quantities" of notebooks are defective, built and packaged with "weak" materials that are leading to them to overheat and fail at a "higher-than-normal" rate, but declined to state which cards specifically.

The Inquirer said every single G84 and G86 card was affected, and a GPU apocalypse was coming, and indeed, more and more models from different manufacturers came to light with the problem. The previous-gen MacBook Pro was actually the last one revealed to be smitten by the plague, like the final Cylon or something, since Nvidia was reportedly less-than-honest about the problem to Apple. Nvidia continued to reiterate most chips are just peachy.

Nvidia says that its current chips don't use the weak materials, which produce what are called "bad bumps." Obviously, the Inquirer thought they were lying, so they took a new MacBook Pro to a lab, cracked it open, sliced apart the G96 GPU and checked it out under a scanning electron microscope with an X-ray microanalysis system.

The result? The Inq says the same old bad bumps, which were composed mostly of lead, are there in the GeForce 9600 vs. the new, good eutectic bumps that are in the GeForce 9400M (the MacBook and MacBook Pro's chipset/integrated graphics). Or more straight up, "The 9600 is unquestionably using 'bad bumps', directly contradicting the statements from Nvidia...It suggests that there are 15-inch Macbook Pros being sold with 'bad bumps', the same materials that brought down so many HP, Dell and Apple parts, both laptop and desktop."

Naturally, I asked Nvidia for their reaction to Charlie's Inq piece, and a spokesperson reiterated that the GeForce 9600 GT graphics cards in the MacBook Pros "don't have bad bumps at all." He said that, "yes, they're lead bumps" but "hundreds of millions of chips have lead bumps." And it's "a different material set [from the faulty one], one they transferred to earlier" that's used in the 9400, 9600 and 9800.

Of course, the Inquirer's whole point is that Nvidia is lying. So, who to believe? Well, here's what we know for sure. When I talked to Nvidia about the original run of faulty chips, and why we saw it some systems and not others, they told me it was largely a thermal issue, which, in combination with the weak materials, would cause the kiss-of-death cracking—so you'd see it in systems that ran hot, in other words, like some notebooks or slimline desktops with poor circulation. (Which is why the "fix" for the problem were firmware updates that cranked the card's fans sooner.)

We further know that the 9600 GT cards in the MacBook Pro are currently having problems that appear to be heat-related, causing them to lock up and launch into the "black screen of death." Also, Nvidia pointed out that there aren't a whole lot of labs properly equipped to do the kind of analysis the Inquirer commissioned—you can't just walk down to your local Discovery Channel store—though they left it at that.

And that's about as definitive as we can get, for now. Two things bother us: We would've liked a slice and dice of one of the previous-gen bad chips to directly compare to the new, supposedly bad one. And Nvidia's subtle implication that the people with labs equipped to perform this kind of analysis have a vested interest in the outcome also has the magical effect of shielding them from the results.

You can believe Nvidia. You can believe the Inquirer. I just know that given the thermal problems that already clearly exist, I really hope the Inquirer is wrong. If you know something about this you wanna share, email me.

Expected to be unveiled at CES, the GTX 295 (nee GTX260 GX2) actually is made up of two print-circuit boards, and each one has a GTX 200 GPU, 240 stream processors, 448-bit memory bus and 896MB DDR3 memory. It's totally outrageous, in other words, and requires 289W of power, so I hope you've got a behemoth of a power supply.

The price, while unknown, will be proportionately juggernaut-sized, crushing your wallet. Since it's designed to beat ATI's Radeon HD 4870 X2, it'll likely fall in the same price range, probably around or slightly north of $500. It could swing cheaper though, since Nvidia's current high-end card, the GTX 280, is trending south of $400 at the moment. Guess we'll see, but I can't afford it either way.

Oh, and first person to ask "will it run Crysis?" is banned. I'm not kidding. [Expreview via X-bit Labs]

New NVIDIA Quadro FX 5800 Graphics Card Featuring CUDA Massively Parallel
Processing Architecture; Offers Most Robust Performance and Features to
Date for Oil and Gas Exploration, Medical Imaging, and Styling and Design
Applications

SANTA CLARA, Calif., Nov. 10 /PRNewswire/ — Professionals searching
for oil, diagnosing illness or styling the next high-performance luxury
vehicle all have one thing in common, the need for advanced visual
computing solutions. NVIDIA Corporation, the world leader in visual
computing technologies, today unveiled the most powerful professional
graphics card in graphics history — the NVIDIA(R) Quadro(R) FX 5800.

"The size and complexity of data is growing at an exponential rate. The
challenge for today's professional is to make sense of the mountain of data
by distilling it into a form they can comprehend, analyze and use to make
impactful decisions," said Jeff Brown, general manager, Professional
Solutions, NVIDIA. "At stake can be billions of investment dollars, or even
people's lives. The Quadro FX 5800 has advanced features to allow massive
datasets to be viewed beyond traditional 3D enabling professionals to make
fast and accurate decisions."

The Quadro FX 5800 graphics card offers unprecedented performance and
scalability to rapidly visualize and interpret massive datasets that until
now were unattainable on a workstation graphics board. Offering up to 240
CUDA(TM) programmable parallel cores and the industries first 4GB of
graphics memory, the Quadro FX 5800 graphics card is ideally suited for oil
and gas exploration, medical imaging, styling and design, and scientific
visualization. Other advanced features of the Quadro FX 5800 graphics card
include:

— Interactive 4D modeling with time lapse capabilities
— Massive memory bandwidth of up to 102 GB per second
— Fill rates that exceed 52 billion texels per second and geometry
performance of 300 million triangles per second
— Support for next-generation OpenGL and Microsoft DirectX 10
applications
— Advanced multi-system and multi-device visualization environments with
Quadro G-Sync II

"Landmark's recently launched GeoProbe(R) R5000 software empowers
geoscientists with an unprecedented ability to visualize large-scale
regional datasets at full resolution from a standard Linux(R) workstation,"
said Nicholas Purday, manager of Geophysical Technologies at Landmark. "The
NVIDIA Quadro FX 5800 graphics card has a more powerful GPU and superior
triangle performance, which make it possible for the GeoProbe application
to quickly render large surfaces, and allow us to move many
computing-intensive processes to the graphics card, significantly enhancing
the overall user experience." Landmark is an industry leading software and
technology services brand of Halliburton, one of the world's largest
providers of products and services to the energy industry.

"The advanced textured graphics capabilities of the Quadro FX 5800 are
enabling CyberHeart to provide 3D radiosurgical target visualization and
definition tools for the purpose of treating cardiac arrhythmias," said
Thilaka Sumanaweera, CTO, CyberHeart. "Our applications are processing very
large data sets acquired by the state-of-the-art 64-slice CT scanners using
respiratory- and cardiac-gating. The Quadro FX cards provide us with the
extreme bandwidth necessary to support our cutting-edge technology, and
essentially, save lives." CyberHeart, Inc., is a medical device company
developing a non-invasive radiosurgical system for cardiac applications.

The Quadro FX 5800 GPU features true 10-bit color enabling billions
rather than millions of color variations for rich, vivid image quality with
the broadest dynamic range. Professionals now benefit from viewing their
models with higher degrees of precision and realism never before possible.

"Our customers are making important decisions about future products on
the basis of RTT-powered 3D real-time models," said Ludwig Fuchs, cofounder
and CEO of RTT. "The new Quadro FX 5800 will be the platform of choice to
bring that arena to the next level. Higher levels of realism, physical
correctness and large models are now made possible through a double number
of cores and a generous frame buffer." Realtime Technology AG, is a leading
supplier of real- time visualization technology and virtual prototyping
solutions to the automotive, aerospace, industrial and consumer goods
design industries.

Pricing and Availability

NVIDIA Quadro solutions are widely available through leading PC
manufacturers and workstation system integrators and NVIDIA channel
partners PNY Technologies (US and EMEA), Leadtek (APAC) and Elsa (Japan).
The Quadro FX 5800 graphics board has an MSRP of $3499 USD. For more
information about the full lineup of NVIDIA professional solutions please
visit http://www.nvidia.com/quadro.

Granted, it's not hard for Dell to roll out a BIOS update that bumps cooling fan RPMs, so it makes sense that they would cover their ass in this way. Although more fan means more noise and less battery life, so the update is not without its costs. Either way, Dell is taking the issue seriously, which makes it seem like the the problem is a little more serious than what Nvidia is saying.

The update is for the following systems: Inspiron 1420, Latitude D630, Latitude D630c, Vostro Notebook 1310, Vostro Notebook 1400, Vostro Notebook 1510, Vostro Notebook 1710, XPS M1330, and XPS M1530

[Direct2Dell via Laptoping]

Here's some more in-depth goods on what Montevina offers. The processor soul is the 45nm Penryn—while last year it mainly offered a battery boost, thanks to Montevina's faster 1066 front-side bus, you'll see some real performance gains this time around. (Intel says up to 50 percent). In that same vein, not only are Intel's integrated graphics faster with the new GMA 4500MHD, it'll let you switch between integrated and discrete graphics (like a card from ATI or Nvidia) on the fly, so you can pick performance when you need it and save juice when you don't. Sony and Lenovo are the first to have notebooks with this tech. On the wireless front, it makes wireless N standard with its new WiFi Link 5000 modules. WiMax is optional, and you'll see that in Centrino 2 notebooks later this year. Finally, it (and Penryn) are totally engineered to simply sip power, like an anorexic model with a venti skim half-decaf no-whip mocha (really, check out Lenovo's X200's retardedly awesome battery life).

BTW, to keep the naming deal straight (damn you, Intel), Montevina is the codename for Intel's new mobile platform, which will be marketed as Centrino 2. It's probable that the next mobile platform, Calpella, due next year, will also be known as Centrino 2 to your mom, if she's sorta tech savvy, so the codenames are still necessary for differentiation (there were actually four different chipsets to carry the Centrino brand). The original Centrino and the accompanying Pentium M processor was actually a paradigm shift in Intel's approach to notebooks, and eventually informed all of their processor designs—energy efficiency as the order of the day. (Or as my friend says, "It was Intel going, 'oh shit' and throwing out NetBurst and going back to the old P6 core design.")

That's Centrino, in a nutshell. Bottom line, it's gonna be the best year ever to buy a notebook.

Something we missed, or you still wanna know? Send any questions about Centrinos, chips, Pringles or anything else to tips@gizmodo.com, with "Giz Explains" in the subject line.

The root of the problem is the substrate/bumping material, which Nvidia themselves had characterized as "weak." The G84 and G86 chipsets use the same application-specific integrated circuit, which the Inquirer has been told had no changes made to it during its life cycle—besides, Nvidia wouldn't change the assembly process or materials for a single batch, according to engineers. So Nvidia's official claim, that the weak materials were only used for a single batch, doesn't hold so much water. And as the Inquirer points out, their fix, to run the fan more to offseat the heat issue simply covers up the problem while it drains your battery.

If this is all true, Nvidia better have more than $200 million set aside for fixes. [The Inquirer

Right now, Badit is chasing the goal of porting PhysX to the Radeon HD 4800, but ATI's not giving them any hardware yet, much less developer and PR support. Not totally surprising that ATI would stall, since porting their rival's physics engine to their cards is a definite poke at them and the Havok engine they license from Intel.

And making PhysX more universal by having it run on ATI cards makes it more likely to be supported by game developers, which isn't so hot for Havok. Nvidia's definitely got the upper deck here, since in the meantime ATI looks like a bunch of meanies, but helping out Badit threatens their own wares. [TGDaily]